A Tasty Set of Digits

In the world of baking, numbers are second nature, Dear Readers.

Pan sizes, ingredient measurements, scale weight versus volume, and oven temperature and time settings indeed play astounding roles in the creation of a taste-tempting dessert. With a meager amount of ingredients and craft-home-inspired techniques, numbers on a recipe are boosted into an exciting taste sensation!

The number 9000 comes to mind today. Not only is it a number of personal proportion, but you might find it significantly interesting when applying this particular set of digits to your own life.

Those Beautiful Taste Buds

Yes, Dear. Readers, housed within the inside of the mouth are about nine millenniums of little sensory detectors known as taste buds that have been gifted to us at birth.

Miss NiNi has often assumed that taste buds are located only on the top side of the tongue. Not so, Dear Readers. These little flower-bulb-like receptors also claim residence on the inside lining of the mouth and act both as receivers and as communicators to the brain through nerves.

Another sensitive number for you to consider is the number 4.

Count them–sweet, sour, salty, bitter—four types of taste sensitivity that vary in response to the millions of food flavors that touch an individual palate.

At wikipedia.org, a tongue map pictures the four significant flavor locations.

Sensing Sweetness

Once food touches the tongue at the front of the mouth, taste buds that hone in on sweetness come alive. Then, as food makes its trip to the back of the mouth prior to swallowing, sides of the tongue detect salty, sour, and bitter flavors—in that order. Kind of interesting, isn’t it?

But, here is my question to you, Dear Readers. As our taste buds celebrate annual birthdays, do they still have the uncanny ability to continue sensing the flavors of their youth?

Unfortunately, they do not. Aging changes that ability. Perhaps, as Miss NiNi has discovered through the years of life, you too have increased the amount of seasoning required to bring chewing satisfaction.

And, know this: women generally report losing taste in their 50s and men in their 60s, according to Dr. Steven Parnes, an ENT-otolaryngologist practicing in New York. www.npr.org

As one might imagine, many additional factors can affect the job performance of aging taste buds. Medicine and injury are just two of those factors.

Therefore, Dear Readers, enjoy the treasured sensory bulbous-like clusters of cells called taste buds that individually and corporately bring tantalizing delight in the process of nourishment. Age will bring change to the little characters!

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About Miss NiNi

The Miss NiNi legend has grown over the years to include customers from coast-to-coast, and a number of Grand Champion Awards in the baking competitions at the Iowa State Fair, the largest food competition of its kind in the United States. With just one bite, we are confident you will see what makes Miss NiNi’s Fine Desserts ‘Delicious Defined.’

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For media inquiries, please contact Miss NiNi by email at NiNi@MissNiNi.com or call 515-264-2112. Miss NiNi is available for interviews, guest appearances and baking demonstrations. For information on fees, please email the address above.